Tagged Questions

Descartes notion of the subject is self-subsistent: the self reflecting on itself finds itself.
The Lacanian mirror appears to introduce an other to find the self - his notion of the subject appears ...

Descartes's third meditation, which sets out to prove the existence of God from previous considerations, confuses me greatly. Descartes appears to be trying to make an argument that the source must ...

The Cartesian argument seems to explicate the fact that I necessarily know that something thinks, and that I necessarily know that something thinks even if I don't checking the world to verify whether ...

When Sartre inverted the Aristotelian doctrine of essence before existence; should he also have inverted the Descartians cogito; not cogito, sum but sum, cogito; given that thinking is the essence of ...

"Meditations" as outlined in his book refers to methods of acquiring knowledge, but what does "First philosophy" refer too/mean?
It certainly does not carry a sequential meaning, because there is no ...

From what I understand in the context of Western philosophy René Descartes famous statement "I think therefore I am" is an example of sythetic a priori. Descartes was a rationalist and this statement ...

In Descartes' forth meditation, he says" The privation, I say, present in this operation insofar as the operation proceeds from me, but not in the faculty given to me by god, nor even in its operation ...

Sorry for the splurge of questions... Obviously Descartes would suggest that we can't doubt that we think, cos doubt is a cognitive attitude. But is it one that occurs when we think it does, i.e. can ...

In all religions what ever existed there are soul and God - two intangible things. From physics we know that there is no difference between particle without eletrical charge, gravity, mass and energy ...

Descartes cogito is 'I think therefore I am'. Can an ant do the same?
Breaking this down, one has 'I think' and I am aware that 'I am thinking' and therefore 'I am'.
One requires here it seems some ...

Even though this isn't exactly accurate, the way I like to think of Descartes' hyperbolic doubt as stating that there's no way to prove that information gained through sensory experience is accurate. ...

What philosophers and in what writings, if any, have attempted to explain or defend Descartes's rationalism in respect to the "cogito ergo sum" fallacy pointed out by philosophers like Russell, and ...

What are Kant's critiques of Descartes's conception of the self contained in the Metaphysical Meditations and of Hume's conception of the self expressed in the Essay concerning human understanding? ...

Descartes' argument for god includes his idea of "objective reality", id est, clear and distinct perception implies existence. Considering his own scientific bent of mind, I'm curious to know what he ...

My history professor recently told us that Michel de Montaigne—who I had never heard of before—had many of Descartes's ideas before Descartes did and that most of Descartes's arguments were not very ...

Descarte famously divided thought from matter and placed them in separate realms.
Spinoza put them together by placing them within God as the two modes - thought and extension - that are visible to ...

Something about my translation has bothered me since I originally posted my question (which follows below). It concerns what Bertrand Russell wrote in "On Denoting". Ryno indicated a circularity with ...

The famous Cogito ergo sum opens with "I" can think, therefore "I" am. How does "I" establish "I" before "I" can "think"?
in other words how did "I" establish "I" before it could think in the first ...

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes resolved to systematically doubt that any of his beliefs were true. This was done in order to build a system of belief that would consist of only ...